


Shards of Time

by HASA_Archivist



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canon - Engaging gap-filler, Canon - Enhances original, Canon - Fills plot hole(s), Canon - Outstanding AU/reinterpretation, Canon - Solves frequent reader complaint, Characters - Family Dynamics, Characters - Friendship, Characters - Good use of minor character(s), Characters - New interpretation, Characters - Outstanding OC(s), Characters - Unusual relationship(s), Characters - Well-handled emotions, Fourth Age, General, Plot - Bittersweet, Plot - Dangerous topic w/satisfying end, Plot - Disturbing/frightening/unsettling, Plot - Good pacing, Plot - I reread often, Plot - Surprising reversals, Subjects - Culture(s), Subjects - Legends/Myth/History, Subjects - Politics, Writing - Clear prose, Writing - Engaging style, Writing - Every word counts, Writing - Evocative, Writing - Experimental, Writing - Well-handled PoV(s), Writing - Well-handled dialogue, Writing - Well-handled introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2003-01-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 06:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4211578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HASA_Archivist/pseuds/HASA_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(PG-13) (complete) Barahir, the writer grandson of Faramir and Eowyn, tries to find out what truth shall he write about his legendary grandmother. Written in answer to the <i>“Éowyn: Heroine or Deserter?”</i> challenge. By A L Milton, illustrated by Hydy</p><p> </p><p>Mithril Awards 2003  - Winner - Best Fourth Age or Beyond<br/>Middle-Earth Fanfiction Awards 2004 - Third Place - Drama: Post War of the Ring</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the HASA Transition Team: This story was originally archived at [HASA](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Henneth_Ann%C3%BBn_Story_Archive), which closed in February 2015. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in February 2015. We posted announcements about the move, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact The HASA Transition Team using the e-mail address on the [HASA collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hasa/profile).

**Author’s Note:** First of all, many thanks to Amy (Praetorian Guard), who is the best beta any author could wish for, to Una (Altariel), who kindly commented on my cookie, and thanks in advance to all the readers and reviewers. A few explanatory notes: for the purposes of this story, I have established the date of Éowyn’s death as FoA 68; Barahir I have made, for plot reasons, the son of Elboron (mentioned in HoME XII as the Second Prince of Ithilien); the Rider and the Captain is what, respectively, the Knight and the Bishop are called in ME chess (the latter comes from Una’s “The King is Dead”). A few more notes are at the end of the story, again due to “spoilers"

******* 

_Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?_  
\- Herman Melville, _Bartleby the Scrivener_   
  
_You built your prison cell yourself_  
then schemed and dreamed of open skies.  
Princess! The river holds the trout;  
so does the world take care of me.  
And if you do not choose to see  
that what we are, we choose to be,  
it’s hard, but it is all one to me.  
The rule is cruel, but there’s no doubt  
I’ll dream tonight of storms at sea…  
Be sure your sins will find you out.  
\- Neil Gaiman, _The Kindly Ones_

Outside his window, the sparrows chattered ceaselessly. They were one of the reasons why he felt, in some insubstantial way, that April was the most pointless month. It came with showers and suns, shifting fogs like tides and green shoots pouring forth from the unkind mysteries stirring in the black cauldrons of the earth. And the sparrows sung constantly to each other, full of puffed chests and stolen trophies. He had seen the birds. He had watched them carefully once, until they had yielded the whole of their usefulness, and then he had stopped. Now he found them merely annoying, and the single notes of their sharp songs hung uncomfortably in the pale Spring air.  
  
He looked at his writing desk, where the stack of parchment stood, neatly arranged, his box of rosewood for quills laid beside it with crisp precision, his little books carefully piled, the inkwell freshly uncovered. He had assigned himself a monumental task, and performed it in shadow. There was a peculiar satisfaction to it, like the proud stoop, the smug calluses, of a master craftsman. It was vanity, until consumed by the unadorned fire of his practicality.  
  
He had to write and he had, so far, written about much. Eldarion, who now sat, grave and righteous, upon the throne, had once said of him, and to him, that he had literary pretensions. His liege lord might have been accurate; he might even have been right. It was true that he could often be found with one of many small leather-bound books protruding from a pocket, a quill and portable inkwell perennially at the ready.  
  
He made a vague expression of displeasure. The little books were useless now. Those trusty tools had not managed to pry open this trick box. He distinctly remembered his first encounter with one such box; it was garishly painted, and it had been given to him by his grandsire, the Prince Faramir, who had possibly thought young Barahir would find it intriguing. Barahir had looked at it for a moment, then pressed the opening mechanism, which was disguised but not absent, and had encountered nothing more than a lid and a seemingly impenetrable cube. He had borne his unadorned expression back then, the one that was as revealing as a mask. It had not changed when he learned, upon asking, that there was no purpose to the box – it had not been made to keep things in or, indeed, anything else. He carefully kept it, though, as a reminder of sorts, even though it was useless, much like the birds. That perhaps accounted for his irritation – it seemed right that things should either have a purpose or, if they were unproductive, they should be unobtrusive.  
  
He opened the rosewood box and snatched up a quill in his deft fingers, as though if by the feline sharpness of the gesture he’d be able to dismiss those nonsensical thoughts of birds and boxes from his well-ordered mind. He valued precision of thought and method. There was method even in his cautious daubing of the quill’s tip in the black ink, like a beak piercing an eye of midnight. He pressed quill to parchment with the care of a man walking on thin ice, and then he halted. Maybe that made him peculiarly unsuitable for his subject matter, that orderliness? Like a careful gardener of raked paths and symmetrical flowerbeds in a briars-covered marsh, a great twisted tree like a mountain in its midst. A great dollop of ink swelled upon the parchment like a black wave in the snapping cold wind of time before he pressed on, as resolute as his dry caution would allow.  
  
 _The Tale of the Lady Éowyn Wraithslayer_ , he wrote, and then he went back and crossed out the last word, inking _The White Lady of Rohan_ instead. For all the literary pretensions his King had endowed him with, he preferred his prose sober; he found that words were like charcoal pencils, and risked being worn pointless. And he found flowery prose almost indecent, somehow, like a pile of over-ripe, sickly-sweet fruit on the brink of decay. True, there were now two occurrences of the word “lady” in his tentative title, but he would correct that soon. He always took great care to correct things.  
  
 _Théodwyn_ , he began, his quill scratching over the parchment like a bone-blade sliding over ice, _was the sister of Théoden, King of Rohan, called Théoden Ednew in the lore of that country, and she was much beloved by her brother. In the year 2989 of the Third Age, she wedded the chief Marshal of the Mark, Éomund of Eastfold. In the fullness of time, she bore him a son, Éomer, and a daughter, Éowyn. Now Éomund was a rider valiant and bold, like his fathers before him, but he was wont to be overly rash in his pursuits, and such a rashness he bequeathed to his daughter_ — He halted. There was truth in this, of course, but he was not certain it was the truth he was trying to impart. He carefully set the quill down, wiping the end on a scrap of parchment. What was the purpose of this? What was the intention? Was it about courage, or selfishness, or some nebulous mix, or even about anything? He did not know, and he hated not knowing, like the trick box, like the muddled things that lived in the edges, far away from any lights of revelation. He did not burn, but somewhere in him there was the shimmering speck of some holy conviction.  
  
Outside, the birds were noisier than ever. He frowned unconsciously at the window and got up hastily. He carefully restored the things on the desk to their original places, the wheels of his mind spinning methodically all the while. It might help to seek some advice; it might help him determine what elusive truth he should write. He cast one last look at his desk and stalked out of the room. 


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (PG-13) (complete) Barahir, the writer grandson of Faramir and Eowyn, tries to find out what truth shall he write about his legendary grandmother. Written in answer to the _owyn: Heroine or Deserter?_ challenge. By A L Milton, illustrated by Hydy

II.

_I was at Dunharrow at that time. I was twelve, but I remember it very clearly. As though it was yesterday. No. No, that is not true. I have forgotten yesterday. But I remember Dunharrow._

When Barahir was very young, he realised the world was shifty. Not in a prosaic sense of dangerousness, although that came soon afterwards. It was not the mundane nature of sin that make him toss and turn in the silver edge of dream. There was nothing remarkable about most wrong-doing; evil was something of almost stultifying dullness. Even the depravity of the great sinners was not particularly… noteworthy. There was something almost comfortingly solid about sin; the murderer’s blade, the thug’s fists, the slanderer’s poison, all were the predictable product of the baser passions, like the beating of a great diseased heart. He would learn all he needed to learn about humanity in his beloved and hated Minas Tirith.

_Memory is the strangest thing._

_They say it is a haunted place._   
  
_Do they? Well, I suppose they are right._

He had been seven, and a wooden shelf in the smaller solar had broken and its contents had come crashing down. It had been of no importance; a serving maid had hurried to clean up the debris, a string of muttered imprecations trailing behind her like ungainly pearls. He had looked in mute horror at the shards of a vase, strewn like sharp jewels around fallen pewter cups and bronze platters. The cups and the platters would go somewhere else, but the broken vase was efficiently swept away, and his child’s mind had somehow endowed that with an enormity he barely perceived, as though in the collapse of that previously solid shelf, the breaking and discarding of that seemingly eternal vase, he had seen glimpses of something whose significance he felt only as a dim cloud above him.

_The Wraiths? No, of course I did not see the Wraiths. You’ll have to ask someone else._

_Yes, I remember then, my lord. I would better like not to, but I remember them. They made you feel… as though you’d never feel happy and whole ever again. Worse than the fear. Worse than the despair._

It was a sharp skerry on the very edge of his awareness, where the waters were cold and deep. The world was balanced on a subtle blade, and as he burrowed deep into the warm nest of his bed in a vain search for solidity, it felt as though the world and all within it were like a house of leaves moments before the wind. He found himself looking flatly at the proud, admired faces of his parents, and the red arms of maids churning butter, and bright pennants caught high in a clear breeze. He wondered who would sweep up the shards of all those things, if they could be crossed out like a misspelled word.

But in here, he could almost reach out and touch the cold slopes of Eternity.

_Nobody tells this story. But I remember._

He stood in the place he had come to think of as the Chamber of the Dead. The name had just come, one day, immovable and complete, and it became inevitable.

He stood in a half-darkened chamber in the palace at Emyn Arnen, and the air was sweet and fragrant of the mustiness of Time. He had gathered many of the things preserved in this place, like a magpie picking up glittering trinkets of the past. But this, the centrepiece, had been here long before his birth. Like a savage idol, motionless and full of a hidden power. He reached forward and picked up a piece of shield, heavy and cold, held it up in a beam of light; motes danced all around it.

What was it like?, he wondered. What was it like to ride into battle? Did you feel Fear gnawing at your insides and see the white face of Death, with his hourglass and scythe? Or was it all reduced to some animal simplicity, a red fog that drove your through the dirt and the blood and the screams? He had often tried to imagine what it must have been like, to ride deliberately into the eye of the storm, to face that terror of wings and darkness with an ordinary shield and sword – this shield and sword.  
  
There was a tapestry behind the pieces: the White Lady and Holdwine the Halfling facing the Witch-King. There was a pale-haired woman holding up a sword against a monstrosity of shadow and terror. She seemed to stir in a ghostly draft.

“Tell me what it was like,” he whispered. “Tell me why.”

He sighed, and he was no longer swept up in her wake. Maybe the problem was with courage and despair – he understood the essence of neither. He had never felt despair because he knew with a dry-eyed practicality that there was always a way, and he had never felt courage because that had been merely the way of a dying world.

His grandsire had tried to tell him about courage once.

“I have evaded your questions too long, my child,” the old Steward said, as they sat together on a bench in the gardens of Emyn Arnen. Barahir was twenty, and he approved of the gardens. They were orderly, and the colourful flowers lay sleepily on their perfectly symmetrical beds. Above them, a tree swayed softly in the scented June breeze, and in the West the sun was beginning to sink into a lake of pink clouds, towards the White City.

“If you say so, sir,” the young man answered calmly.

Faramir’s face showed no more emotion than the wearied sadness that had hung about him since the Lady Éowyn’s death. It was a drab sort of sadness – grey, dull, walking hunched in the rain. Barahir contemplated his father’s father dispassionately; the Steward had been ill for most of the past year, and so he had delegated many of his tasks upon his son Elboron. And he was old and widowed and unhappy. Barahir’s cool, quick mind spun a number – five more years, it said, five more years on the outside – and wrote it down in the ledgers of his memory; eventually, he would find out whether or not he was right. It always made for interesting speculation.

“Yes, I do.” It was Faramir’s turn to look at him, his steel-grey eyes undulled for a moment, sharpening as though Time was spinning back. Barahir almost felt an urge to lower his own eyes. So there is still life in the old bird, he thought coolly, and then found himself holding a bauble that could have been pity. He stored it away in the vaults of his mind; you never knew when things might be useful. “I always felt, somehow, that you should have been born sooner. Grandchildren give many of the pleasures and few of the worries of children. But all my children married late and I do not have many days left, and it’s too late for regrets not my own. I still wish I had known you longer, though: all of you, but yourself and Míriel especially. Parents should have no favourites, but when grandparents play at that game, they are judged less harshly.”

Barahir nodded in silence.

“It is of no importance now,” his grandsire continued. “You cannot change the past.”

Barahir, who knew the truth, remained silent.

“You want to know what I did in the War of the Ring.”

Barahir nodded again. He had heard this story before, from other lips. But there were not many now who could remember, not many memories apart from the songs and the legends. He had heard this story before, but he would not say so. He would keep silent and welcome it. And the old Steward would do like all of those who told Barahir their stories; for a moment, they felt treasured, the young man’s eyes receiving their words like a patch of parched land receiving rain. His silence had a way of giving them importance, even if it was just while they spoke. He gave them meaning.

“I did nothing.”

Barahir did not pretend surprise. They always wanted to fill his silences.

“And then again, that is not _entirely_ truthful. My father brought up the matter of the garrison at Osgiliath, and I, because I was eager to prove myself, took the bait. What were his intentions in the matter, I do not know, and as it comes to guessing, I’d prefer not to. I know _my_ intentions, and they were not particularly flattering, as they were mostly of a selfish nature, which is something a Captain of Men should not harbour in his heart, and if he finds it, he should take great care to root it out. I, however, considered myself above such things, and believed I strained for loftiness in all decisions. And when I accepted the command at Osgiliath, I feigned to myself that I was not doing so out of slighted pride. I pretended that there was no urge to prove to my father, the world and myself that I was a match in courage for my brother, that they should love me as they had loved him. Mithrandir, of course, saw through me, as always, and gave some advice I should have heeded. It is truly a great pity that the Grey Pilgrim had to sail into the West. You, for one, would have liked him.”

Barahir remained as still as a sleeping cat. He had long since started to salvage the past in ink and he would have given his right arm for a chance at a few words with the old wizard, even though he scarcely could believe there had ever been such a thing as a wizard.

“Maybe you think I am being too harsh on myself,” Faramir went on, “and that I had not much choice in the matter. But truth is no enemy of compassion, and falsehood no friend. I could have told my father that such an enterprise was madness, that the enemy could well afford to lose a host there but we certainly could not afford to lose good men in a venture that was doomed to fail. I could have said that. It might not have made much of a difference, but remaining unsaid, it made none. There is always a choice. Remember that, for it will help you greatly in the world. Even when your pride does not let you see it, there is always a choice.” He stood quiet for a moment, his face drawn, as though contemplating a sad, pale memory. Then he looked at his grandson once more. “Be as it may, I went. I was convinced, in my folly, that I could hold Osgiliath, and I could not accept the fact that, by not objecting, I had made a bad decision. I was never able to do that, you know. I still cannot.” He smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.

“It was slaughter. I cannot describe it and you cannot conceive of it, so we’d best leave it at that. I ended up losing almost one third of my men, and none of those deaths was clean and quick. Some of them died to take a blade or an arrow meant for me, as it is always the weak who pay for the foolishness of the strong, you see. We had to retreat, eventually, and that is what we did.”

Faramir felt silent, staring at the ground as though something fascinating laid there, a solitary ant, a pebble bright upon the grass. The silence troubled Barahir; too-still waters that made him feel as though the hunter was the prey, as though his trusty instrument had been turned against him.

“Sir?”

The Steward turned to face him. “I’m sorry, child, I am not finished yet. There is a little more to this story. It turns out I did not do only ill. We had to retreat, as I have said, for the strength of our enemy could not be withstood, and there was the Fell Captain, who came bearing fear, and despair.” Barahir was almost certain his grandsire shivered ever so slightly at some memory riding unbidden upon his own words. “But as we were falling back into the Causeway Forts, it all changed. It was no longer a matter of pride, of letting others die to hold to already dearly paid possessions. It became a simpler matter of saving my men. I could not, would not let them be slaughtered by the Shadow in a panic. I believe it was only then I acted with true courage. I say so not in vanity, for there can be nothing vain about it, as courage does not bear such trappings. It is no more and no less than to do what you know is right, and know that it is the only thing you can do. This none can teach you, Barahir, but you must learn it, for you will need it in days yet to come.”

Barahir found himself wishing to buckle under that steel-stare once more. And he wondered how it was possible that a man who was old and ill could yield such power. He did not hear his voice whispering in his blood, and would have paid no heed if he did; already he dealt in words, in figures, in solid things that could be pinned down with black ink like so many butterflies pinned down on cork. He wished to say: sir, your words are fair and wise, but they are for a time that is not my own. You were wrought in a time of war, and so you had to learn courage and hope for the future. But I was wrought in a time of peace, and so I learn mistrust and caution. Yours were the days of heroes and fighting men; but your world has changed, and new days are at hand: those of politicians and treaty-makers and scriveners. Now you can rest deservedly in glory, but you must let us make our peace. And the peace we make may not be the peace you fought for.

He kept silent, though, an unfamiliar lump in his throat. He knew not why, but for the first time the essence of those words made him sad. They were like the news of a death, made bitter for their truth.

Now he swept the past away. Did it matter now? That had been long ago, and the first Prince of Ithilien had long since gone to his grave, replaced with almost indecent haste by Barahir’s father, and no pondering on that unreachable courage would help him untangle this knot that was his grandmother. His brows furrowing, he picked up the piece of shield again, and stared absent-mindedly into it.

“You can come out now, Mazikeen,” he said calmly.

There was a rustle from a shadowed alcove.

“And I thought I was doing so well,” a voice said.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (PG-13) (complete) Barahir, the writer grandson of Faramir and Eowyn, tries to find out what truth shall he write about his legendary grandmother. Written in answer to the _owyn: Heroine or Deserter?_ challenge. By A L Milton, illustrated by Hydy

III.

His grandmother Éowyn carved out his path in life without his even knowing it, by some irony of fate in the very year the Red Book of the Periannath had come to Minas Tirith. Whether or not she was aware of her doing, he knew not. He was only a child, and she had been such a great lady – he had drunk the tale of her greatness with his nurse’s milk, and the songs of her legend had been his lullabies. She was like an idol, and even when, later on, he had begun to ponder her possible feet of clay, she was still an idol, full of a whole, unbreakable significance. You did not write about idols. It did not matter if they were mere stone or the very mouthpiece of the Valar. Either way, they were idols, and that was the source entire of their power.

And yet, when he was seven, she appeared to be no more than an old woman always sat in front of a warm fire, her hair a cloud of white, her wrinkled, blue-veined hands resting all day on her lap. It was after the time in which he had started to mutely notice the end of everything, and he sat on a fur rug on the floor in front of her, no servants about, as was her wont, watching her as patiently as a cat watching a mouse hole. He had a vague notion that this was somehow undignified, but it was an awareness much like a moth banging against the outside of a window, and thus irrelevant.

It seemed incredible to him that this woman shrunk by age, this woman who was nodding off with a shaggy shawl draped around her shoulders, had slain the Lord of the Nazgûl. He did not know what a Nazgûl was, but it sounded like something tremendously difficult to kill. Surely it could not be true? Surely it was some other woman the songs spoke of?

She looked at him suddenly, awake, her eyes like an unsheathed sword. He felt himself drawing back. You did not doubt the idol.

“Young Barahir,” she said flatly. “No doors to listen at today?” He blushed in embarrassment. She had once caught him trying to listen at his mother’s chamber door, and she had never quite allowed him to forget about the incident.

“I am sorry, lady, I did not mean to pry,” he said feebly.

To his surprise, she laughed. It was a raspy sort of laugh, tired, but a laugh nonetheless.

“Forgive me, child,” she said, and there was – incredibly – a touch of tenderness to her voice. “I have jested far too much about that. You’ll have to forgive an old woman who takes her pastimes in the few places where she can find them. I know you did not mean to pry. You simply wished to know, and there is no evil in that.” She paused for a moment, as if to regain her breath, a set of gnarled fingers adjusting the shawl. “And as you like to know, I will tell you a few things. Have you something you can write this on?”

“I… I will call for—“

She made an impatient gesture of dismissal. “Have you, or have you not?”

He was roused now, her steady voice like a wind that brought a scent through a wood, for twitching noses and ready paws. It was a striped excitement, black and gold, waiting in a dark branch; he barely comprehended it.

“Not on me, lady. But I have something in my bedchamber,” he added hurriedly.

“Go and fetch it, then,” she ordered.

He got up, swept up in the old woman’s aura, and in moments he was back, shaking with hurry and awe, a small book in one hand, a quill and inkwell in the other. The little book was where he wrote down the meanings of new words he came across in his readings, or elsewhere. It was half-full by now, but it did not matter.

“Sit, sit,” she said, gesturing with one hand. He sat down on the rug once more, his widened eyes focused upon her. She adjusted the ends of her shawl once more, slowly and deliberately.

“I’m certain you’ve heard a great many things about me, child, if my pride does not deceive me,” she began at last, “ and a great many of them made up for a better rhyme. I like those songs, in any case, perhaps because I grew up with others that were much the same, and yet I thought there would never be one sung about myself. Are you writing this down?”

She spoke for a long time, and Barahir did not have any chance of disappointment at the fact that all her words were about songs of Rohan from her childhood, memories of her young days with her brother and their cousin, childhood memories of childhood times and childhood aches. He was too busy writing it down, following her intermittent commands, trapped in the silver thread of time she worded as forcefully as a prophecy, writing it as though each unimportant word was a monolith of revelation. Finally, she fell silent and closed her eyes.

He placed the quill in the inkwell, trying not to upend both onto the rug. He blew on the pages he had covered with words lopsided in his rush; it was an almost pointless gesture, as most of what could smudge had smudged already, but it was, he knew, necessary. He felt curiously drained. He could not understand it – no more he could understand that impermanence he had realised – but he could sense some peculiar magic at work here. The words were there, like coals upon a floor, or shiny black beetles on a road pale with dust. They told of no more than the childhood recollections of an old woman who had once been the sister-daughter of the King of Rohan. He did not know why she had felt such an urge to share them. They were confused, jumbled, like shards of broken glass. But they were there, and would still be there when she was gone into her grave. No one would remember those simple stories after that, but the words might. He sensed something deep there, like a swimmer might feel a drop in the riverbed, a transformation performed through himself. He felt his skin prickle, as though it was not enough to hold both himself and that knowledge. He let the book slide onto the rug, pages up, as he was, foremost and always, a careful boy, and got up very slowly, his eyes fixed upon the silent, close-eyed woman, who sat like a house recently emptied.

She opened one eye a mere fraction.

“I am not dead yet, boy,” she said. “Soon enough, but not yet.”

He stood aimlessly. Then he pointed at the fallen book and mouthed “why?”

She seemed to bristle at the question, her head suddenly risen proud and stern, and for all the sigils of old age upon her face, he suddenly had a glimpse of how she must have been, fair and fearsome like a thorny flower. “I would think I do not have to justify my actions in my own house,” she said.

He blushed again. “I am sorry, lady. I did not wish to presume.”

Her expression mellowed at that, like a rough stone smoothed by a careful hand. “Come here, dearest,” she asked, and he obeyed unthinkingly, [kneeled down](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v651/alm/shards.jpg) next to her at a gesture, letting her welcome his head on her lap, her fingers stroking his hair. “You have to forgive your old grandmother’s sharp tongue. I was ever ungentle, even with those I have loved. But for those my harshness was rarely meant to hurt. No excuse, I know,” she added. She felt hard and warm against him, and the wool of her dress was itchy against his face. “You are my son’s son, and I love you. And, Barahir…” She drew his face up gently, holding his chin in her hand.

“Yes, grandmother?” he asked softly.

“Those songs that sing of my deeds… there will be foolish people who will tell you that I rode to war because I was slighted by one who would not return my love. They will tell you that I wished to be loved by the Lord Aragorn—”

His face betrayed some wide-eyed surprise. “Is that—?”

“King Elessar? Yes. But those who speak thus presume to know my heart when I did not know it myself.”

“But… did you love him?” He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. His grandmother, however, did not lash out at him; somehow, her face was almost kindly as she answered.

“I have loved many people,” she said gnomically. “Yes, I love him dearly, perhaps only really loved him properly afterwards… but not that way. Do you know the light of the Moon is not his own, but rather a reflection of the light of the Sun? Or so I have been told, at least, by someone who should know. Loved in the manner you speak of, I think there was only one. I hope I have been worthy of him. Of all that I won. Am I worthy of this honour, and of this house, do you think? I must say it makes the Meduseld I knew look like a thatched barn.” She laughed at this, as though she had made a joke that was both very amusing and inexpressibly bitter. Then her face fell serious once more. “And all of this is but to say: be true to yourself, Barahir. Now pick up your things, stop playing truant to your studies and let an old woman enjoy a good fire.”

He gathered his things, got up and obeyed her hurriedly, running out of the room with ink staining his hands, rushing as though he had touched a dead white coldness and wished to run back to sunlight and heat and life. That night, he had a dream. He was standing in a great darkened room the size of cities, and in its vastness there were rows upon rows of shelves and each shelf was full of books. And then the shelves wavered and vanished, like a reflection on a pond shattering with a thrown stone. Now the room was bare, and its limits were lost in a darkness like a void night without a star. Under a single solitary beam of light a young, dark-haired woman sat on a chair next to a spinning wheel. She held a great book in her hands, and as his sleeping body lay in the stillness of dream, Barahir was almost certain he knew what was written upon it, like a thing seen through a veil, a hair’s breadth away from touch, and the realisation made him shiver.

Then she raised her eyes to him, eyes that looked as though they had seen empires rise and fall, and nations vanish, and prophecies broken and fulfilled, and remembered it all, and had felt it all as no more than a moment, the day of a mayfly. Her eyes were full of meaning, and he felt it touching him in some deep, inscrutable level. Presently, she spoke, and with each word, ringing like a silver bell in the depths of a lake, came the knowledge that this was a dream, and it would drift instantly into forgetfulness.

And then he woke up.

Not long afterward, he began writing down things. In the precociousness of his childhood, he realised that writing was what he did, that was what he must do. In the dullness of his teenaged days, he traced out his mission with the peculiar certainty, the peculiar sullenness of his years. He would write down a history of everything, or at least everything that mattered. Politics, geography, finance, all that he studied long into the night, a stack of books in front of him, his handwriting dry and meticulous. But he would write history with dialogue, a truth to be read and enjoyed and remembered. Songs were made for rhyme, not reason, and full of passion he mistrusted. The truth in songs tumbled away like dead leaves in the wind. And even the statues of kings crumbled under the unforgiving hand of Time. Only the written word lived, and it lived in its unspoken power, eternal even as cities burned and nations fell, a life discreet but undimmed. He could feel almost enthusiastic about it.

He was pleased with himself. He thought in centuries, while others were content with a handful of years. There was something monumental about it, something almost coolly divine; he felt no particular vanity about it, despite that, except perhaps only in the fact that it was fleshless. There would be no base sweat and blood in this creation. That pleased him even more than the knowledge that, were he to record it, there would be a remembrance of the fall of every sparrow.

He was halfway through it, now. He read old records, but old records made for dusty pages. So he spoke to people, or rather, had people speak to him. His silence unnerved them. His stare loosened their tongues as surely as a trickle of water carved a furrow in the hardest stone. He searched for the truth in their words like a gold-digger sifting with stony concentration though a pile of rubble in search of the noble metal, and as he wrote down his findings he often lamented the fact that there were so few living who could remember.

There was a quality to the Truth. And yet, now that he wished, needed to write of his grandmother the legend, he could not find it.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (PG-13) (complete) Barahir, the writer grandson of Faramir and Eowyn, tries to find out what truth shall he write about his legendary grandmother. Written in answer to the _owyn: Heroine or Deserter?_ challenge. By A L Milton, illustrated by Hydy

IV.

“I’m afraid you were not doing that well,” he said. “After all, you still have a reflection.”

The one called Mazikeen stepped up to him, unruffled and silent like a cat. Barahir could not help but feel that there was a certain lack of congruence between her head-scarf of the Wind Treaders of Harad and Gondorian dress, but he certainly found the effect aesthetically pleasing.

“I should have tried harder,” she replied. There was the tinge of an accent to her words. “Maybe I will never surprise you.” She sounded almost disappointed. “And you are late.”

He sighed. “Well, my apologies. I did not come here to exchange amusing banter in any case. I have a problem.”

She raised a single eyebrow. It was an ability he greatly envied.

“Oh? A shipment of grain fetched half a crown below your prediction?”

He folded his hands together. That was indeed more pressing. More _relevant_. Grain and ships and ledgers. Not shifting legends, blood or no blood.

“No,” he said calmly. “It concerns my book.”

Mazikeen knew of his book. She was the only person who did. What had led him to tell her, what wordless impulse, he did not know, but perhaps it was that he saw something of himself in her.

“What is the matter?” she asked genially. She made her asking sound like a tremendous act of generosity.

“I wish – or rather, I have to – write the tale of my grandmother Éowyn, who was called the White Lady of Rohan.”

“Éowyn Wraithslayer?”

He eyed her coolly. “Sometimes I forget you know the stories of my country as well as your own.”

“You forget nothing, Barahir. What did she do you cannot write about? She rode to war in disguise, killed the Rider of Shadow—“

“The Lord of the Nazgûl…”

“Yes, yes,” she waved dismissively, “many names. It’s a perfect story. Even the Halfling makes it perfect. Those who were not wanted were those who did the most. And she was a woman, which makes it even better. A story that comes with an edifying lesson, and you cannot write it?”

“It is not quite that straightforward, Mazikeen.”

She had an expression of annoyance. The row of small medallions bordering her head-scarf shook silently upon her hair. “Don’t tell me you cannot write about her simply because she was your grandmother.”

He made a dry little sneer. “The bonds of family bind both ways. You should know that.”

She lowered her eyes, as though a pair of black wings had just passed over her. “Yes. I know.”

“You also know that is not the reason.”

“What is it, then? Legend? You wrote about legend before. You care naught for legend. You care for the truth, or at least a truth you can write down.”

He turned away from her slightly, gazing back at the relics of shield and sword, the tapestry, the shrine to the idol. He had the face of one who is watching a footrace he does not much care about, but who will stay to the end out of an incurable, genteel boredom.

“If I were to do what she did,” he said presently, “what would you call me?”

“Ah! You would not. But supposing so, you would be a hero. That is the answer?” She was playing very calmly with a golden bracelet, making it spin leisurely around her wrist.

“And what if I were trothplight to wed you but then ran away, what would I be?”

The bracelet halted on its journey. “Then you would be a liar,” she answered calmly, her face as still and unreadable as a mask.

“There is your answer, then.”

“I am quite certain it is not a broken trothplight you refer to. If it were, it would just make everything more… romantic. Running from a wedding to fight the Rider, how _story-like_.”

“No story there. It is much too confusing, and therefore does not make for good reading. And it comes with an unpleasant sort of lesson, if any at all.”

Mazikeen’s swaggering, erratic curiosity was piqued.

“Explain yourself,” she said.

He did.


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (PG-13) (complete) Barahir, the writer grandson of Faramir and Eowyn, tries to find out what truth shall he write about his legendary grandmother. Written in answer to the _owyn: Heroine or Deserter?_ challenge. By A L Milton, illustrated by Hydy

V.

She had been a very minor lady, a woman of Rohan who had come to Gondor in her youth and married a nobleman of little consequence and had, as is often the case in such circumstances, embraced Gondor’s customs and life with the self-conscious passion of a foreigner. When Barahir spoke to her, in his late teens, she had three children (all dutifully named according to the most traditional – and by then old-fashioned – Gondorian customs), half a dozen grandchildren, a great-granddaughter, a widow’s garb and one foot very obviously in the grave.

She had not been exceedingly difficult to find, but he had rejoiced, in his own silent fashion, as much as a craftsman finishing his masterwork. There were so few living now, fewer still amidst the Rohirrim, for they were a short-lived people and he had no desire to visit the barbaric plains of the Mark. There was something about open country that made him fret, a feeling much akin to the realisation that soon there would be nothing but hearsay of hearsay to remember the past by. It was as necessary, as imperative, to preserve the truth in his solid written words as it was to remain within solid walls, close to the heartbeats, the life, the death of Minas Tirith. The widow of Rohan was almost a reward for his meticulousness, a rare butterfly carefully dried and stored in a place of honour, to be looked at many times a day.

She received him with a courtesy that bordered on barely-concealed excitement, or as much excitement as her dried old body could conjure. As interview had been suggested, an invitation sent and accepted and after she had proudly shown to her future Prince and Steward her house, its grounds and her careful preserving of her husband’s memory and standing, they now sat in the woman’s receiving room. A maid with a neck like a stork’s and a walk to match had stiltedly brought them a tray with cups of mulled wine. He was expecting it – there would be no fashionable Haradrim _haisa_ here, rich and dark and strong. He gave instructions for his guard to be offered refreshments while he waited for his master. There was no point in troubling the man more than the strictly necessary; he would have come without him, but it did not do for the grandson of the Prince of Ithilien to walk about unguarded. He personally believed that, were an assassin to require him as a target for his crossbow’s bolt or his dagger, not even the whole of the White Company would be able to protect him. He had decided that the best way to achieve safety was to be either too unimportant – as now – or too important – as he would have to be when and if he became the Steward – to be eliminated. In the great chess game of life, there wasn’t a position quite so fine as that of the board.

The woman sipped her drink delicately. There were two twin folds of skin hanging from the sides of her jaw like the sails of a ship. Barahir looked at them discreetly, almost with fascination.

“My lord,” she said politely, “you referred in your message to a certain matter that may concern me. You have to forgive the hastiness of an old woman who feels she has not long before the sun last sets on her, but I would humbly ask you if it is possible to address that matter.”

He looked at the cup of wine in his hands, raised a face with the expressionless smoothness of a bone. "Lady, I believe you may have been at Dunharrow at the time of the War of the Ring,” he said without preamble.

The old woman’s pale skin did not blanch any further, but there was a tightening to her features, as though she had come across a spectre rising from the grave of the past. A phrased bobbed to the surface of his mind, uncalled. _Be sure your sins will find you out_. Whose sins, he wondered.

“That is an old story,” she finally said. Her diplomacy was admirable, and wholly Gondorian. “And of little consequence now.”

“Oh, but just because it’s old, that does not mean it’s without consequence. I find that old stories are often of great interest. Also, and far more importantly, it is a true story. You see, I am a collector of such stories, the sort of stories that are not written down in books but are no less true for that. In fact, such stories may be more true that the stories that _are_ written down. I think such tales should be better known, don’t you agree, my lady?”

The woman said nothing, but to him, she looked as though she were weighing fears and hopes in a great pair of scales.

“My lord… you will not like this story.” A faint touch of despair there, a vain last attempt, red and vulnerable.

“If it is true, I cannot like it nor dislike it more than a chair or a tree. It will not cease to exist for my disliking of it. I will not command you pettily, for I am commander of none, but I ask you respectfully, lady – tell me.” There was an inflection to his voice, the interrogator’s subtle pincer, sweet as treacle, hard as steel, tempting as sin. “Tell me.”

She looked at him and into his stare, like a fox caught in a trap, a horse walking into the pits dug by his silence, boats washed ashore by the misleading light of his eyes. People always talked. They came to face with the unexpected sensation of someone giving them his full, emptied attention, and they blurted out everything, anything that would drive away that cold eye, that empty bowl of silence waiting to be filled.

“Very well,” she said, lowering her eyes, then raising them again in a sudden bout of defiance. “Someone else might as well know of this. I never expected, though, that it would be… Well, no matter. Yes, I was at Dunharrow at the time. I was twelve, but I remember it very clearly…”

She went on in a calm, clean voice, telling of the trip from Edoras to Dunharrow, spirits high and bold like a flag in a clear day, the White Lady leading them, commanding and strong. Though there was tiredness, there was no fear then, for how could fear find a hold in Rohirrim hearts when Théoden King had regained the strength of Eorl himself? How could there be dread when they had been entrusted to the Lady Éowyn, in bravery the match of any Rider, who as the King’s sister-daughter had the most to fear yet felt it the least? They had sung, and the girl had caught the eye of the Lady and that stern, proud woman had smiled at her for an instant; it had made her feel special, like a young soldier singled out by his captain for praise.

At first, she had been too fascinated by Dunharrow to pay much heed to anything else. There was a war raging, but she was a daughter of Rohan, and the children of the Mark did not let themselves be cowed by the winds of war. There had been no thoughts of war as she looked upon the great rows of stones, wondering about what hand had made them, long-ago, or who and what were the Pûkel-Men she had found both comical and intimidating in her climb into the Hold.

“My father was one of the men who could be spared to accompany us,” she explained, “and as my mother had died two years before of the Wasting Fever, I often wandered away from the Hold and around Firienfeld, as I did not obey the woman with whom I was staying as I might have one of my blood.”

Things had gone well at first, and the few hard words that had come with the difficulty of their journey had quickly been ended and disputes quenched by the discerning command of the Lady. To the young girl, the White Lady had seemed without reproach, fair and bold and wise, and at night in the booth, as she squeezed in the makeshift bed she shared with the woman and the woman’s three children, she thought about the Lady as one looking through the window of a stately house might wonder about those living in the light and splendour inside. She wondered about her, and what she was doing in her painted pavilion that looked like a great flower, and imagined that she slept at the foot of the Lady’s bed and brought her her cup and braided her hair. She supposed the Lady smelt like the snow on a bright slope, not like too many bodies in too little space.

“And then the Lord Aragorn, who is now King Elessar, came to Dunharrow,” she said, and took another sip of her cup, as though to steady herself.

She had seen very little of him, and had not known who he was, save that he had been a powerful, commanding man. Some captain of Mundburg or some other such place, she had thought – her knowledge of the lands beyond Edoras was hazy and sketchy at the time – and with him came a small company, with a sturdy Dwarf and three who had about them the light and grace she had heard of in tales of the Elder Race. She had assumed they were Elves from Dwimordene. They had not stayed long, and she would have thought no more of it if, in her explorations of Firienfeld, a whole realm for the greedy, savage child she had been, she had not come one evening across the Lord Aragorn and the Lady talking outside the booth he was sharing with the Dwarf and one of the Elves.

“I hid behind the booth, but neither would have seen me in any case. The Lady was clad in white and she looked beautiful and sharp, yet sad. They talked for a while, and although I did not hear all of it, I heard enough.”

“The Lord Aragorn, as the entire Hold knew by then, wanted to take his company to the Haunted Mountain, the Dwimorberg, into the Paths of the Dead. For a twelve year old that sounded less fantastic than it would later, and the Lord Aragorn travelled in the company of Elves and Dwarves in any case, and which way should a legend take but a way of legend? As for the Lady Éowyn…”

She paused, and took another sip of wine. After, she turned to the cup in her hands for a silent moment, as though she were trying to make it yield some vital knowledge from its surface that gleamed like slow rubies in the light.

“The Lady Éowyn wanted to go with him, of course. I do not blame her for that, as who wouldn’t want to be a part of legend? I would have liked to have gone myself, I thought at the time, but I was a young girl with no duty to fulfil and no charge to mind but myself. She, however, had been given the command of the people by the King himself. But she did not heed that; what mattered to her washer glory, her chance at valiant deeds. She talked of her fears and her wants, but as for us, the people who followed her, the people who needed her… why, she had no more for us than a passing thought, spoken in displeasure, displeasure at the fact that we were there, existing to rob her of the chance to lead her life as she pleased.” The old woman blinked like an owl in the light, and her voice dropped to little more than a whisper, shrinking as a wave retreats after it blasts the shore. “I am sorry, my lord. I did say you would not like it.”

“Don’t be, lady. I do like your story. It is most… refreshing.” He immediately wondered if that was the appropriate word to convey to her the essence and subtlety of his difference from others, so much like a white flag flying low in a foggy day. “Do go on.”

She went on, with a sliver of eagerness more than he expected at first, before he realised that she dealt with her buried tale as one might deal with a buried canker, eager to root out its poisonous wholeness.

Even at twelve she had felt the sharp tug of rejection, felt it with that peculiar clarity of children. The Lady didn’t really care about any of them. She cared only to follow that captain. She would never braid the Lady’s hair or bring her her cup or sleep at the foot of her bed. It had been an illusion, dispelled like morning mist under an unforgiving sun. She had been so surprised in her disappointment she had not even heard the Lady’s steps approaching her. She had only realised she was in her path when the Lady had surged in front of her, gleaming and haunting like a spectre in her white dress. She had held her breath, but the Lady had just given her a brief look and had stalked off to her pavilion. It was the sort of look that slid over you and told you you were no one, or at least no one who mattered.

“The Lord Aragorn went off in his quest with his companions the following day, of course, and I saw them depart, for who would hinder an unimportant little girl from walking around the Hold? She was there, of course, girt like a Rider this time, and I saw her get on her knees and weep and beg for him to allow her to accompany them. She was looking at him with hunger – but somehow, it was hunger for something else. I don’t know how I remember things that were beyond my understanding at the time, but perhaps my child’s mind kept them the same way a child keeps a bright stone she later comes to realise is a precious gem. So later I understood that she looked at him like a hungry dog looks at an empty bowl – it is hungry for the food that may fill it, not for the bowl itself.” She shook her head. “I fear I am making little sense, my lord.”

“No, lady, it’s all perfectly clear.”

She took a little breath, her wrinkled, loose-skinned face almost sagging, and then she went on. “Théoden King came the following day from the Hornburg with his Riders and a Halfling in the company, yet another legend. There were some, however, who did not come back. There was very little weeping, though, and from my side there was none, as I knew none of those who perished as more than names or faces. We were Rohirrim, and Rohirrim do not weep. Not while war rages, while the times ask for strength. Then, when the war is done, we bury our dead, and wail, and sing of them.” The corners of her mouth raised in a half-grimace. “Or at least we do so at times. Sometimes.” She paused for a moment, a hand raised to her face. “No matter. I was telling you about Dunharrow, not the customs of the Mark. I spoke to my father in the meantime and tried to tell him, in my awkward way, that the Lady Éowyn brooded. You see, when I was acting sullenly, my father always told me it did not do well to brood. But he answered only that it was no wonder she brooded, when the red arrow of Mundburg had come again, and the whole host of the Eorlingas was to ride forth in remembrance of our old allegiance.”

She had almost trembled with excitement and fear, and had almost forgotten the exchanges she had overhead. The red arrow had come, shot through the miles like a scarlet token of the past. Dwarves and Elves and the red arrow and the Haunted Mountain – she could not bring herself to think of war, which was a drab, dull thing she had grown up with, nor of her bitter child’s sorrow at the Lady’s dismissal, which she wished to forget. The host would ride forth, and her spirits were so elated it was almost terrifying. It seemed the host would ride forever into song, not into the strife of battles.

“My father was to stay, as we were not to be left completely unguarded in our exile. I think I acted with some disappointment at that; I wanted my father to be part of the legend and the glory. But secretly I believe, or at least hope, I was relieved, as he would be safe that way – I did not, of course, even consider that none might return, and that we all might die in the last defence of our land and ourselves, and the realm of the Shadow would know no end.

“They went away the day after they had come, and the dawn of that day came with no light, full of a murky, dreary darkness that poured out of the East and fell on your spirits like a heavy hand crushing a spider. There had been whispers in the night of some spectral ride. Yet we were not defeated; we stood there, to watch them go, and we were proud. The husband of the woman I was staying with was going, but she did not cry. She held herself stern and sad but tearless. We all did. We were Rohirrim. And then I escaped from her distracted vigilance and ran until the edge of the stones and stood there until the Riders vanished out of sight.”

Barahir caught a glimpse of her memory like a dust mote out of the air, and there was a small girl running after a thunder of hooves, falling back out of sight like a minute wild flower in a meadow of rock. She had stayed there by the monoliths for some time, her mood shifting like the shadows in the lightless sky, until she had heard a voice, her father’s voice, calling for her. He had sounded hurried, worried, and had grabbed hold of her with a sharp word and rushed with her back to the Hold. He had returned her to the woman, whose formerly impassive face was now rippled with worry, and gave her a barked command not to go straying again. The woman’s three young children had been clinging to their mother, wide-eyed like moon-calves. There were knots of people, murmuring voices and shifting eyes and old women who had come from behind wooden doors, harsh and hesitating. What is happening?, she had asked the woman, and she had answered simply, the Lady Éowyn. The guardsmen had raised their voices to quieten the people, to cast away that unaccustomed fear that fed off them like a raven of torment pecking here and there in a battlefield full of a scarlet sunset.

“The truth, of course, was that the Lady Éowyn was nowhere to be found. It seemed somehow to be appropriate for the day, so full of that deep, murky darkness that sapped your will like a constant drip-drip-drip of water, day and night, filling the silence. I did not feel it so sharply – for some reason, children didn’t – but I still felt it, like the weight of death. We managed to pull together, despite that, and told each other that, surely, she could not be far? The Riders had gone only some hours previously, and the Lady had said her farewells right before the muster. She was not in her pavilion, but surely she could not be hiding behind a rock? No doubt she had simply gone some paces down the long, winding road, as it were after all her King and mother-brother, and her own brother who had left. Or maybe she had gone to see if danger crept out of the path that lead into the Haunted Mountain. Had there not been those strange tales of a nameless whisper riding through the land, a host of ghosts? It made the child I was think of skeletal riders upon skeletal horses.

“Some said we should just wait for her, to stop our nonsense and just wait for her to ride back into the Hold. And so we waited, for a while, but it was the nervous sort of wait of a rabbit eating hurriedly in the knowledge that a fox may be watching at the edge of the field.”

He nodded.

“We waited,” she went on, “and she did not come. After a while, all sorts of guesses were being made and spread: perhaps she had lost herself in the mirk, perhaps she had been waylaid by those dreadful spectres whose voices some now claimed to have heard in the night, perhaps the orcs or some other enemies of the Mark had taken her, were maybe climbing into the Hold on that very instant, perhaps she had simply become ill or fallen on her way back from wherever it was she had gone to and was now lying on the ground, maybe in pain, maybe dying.” She made an expression of distaste. “Do you know that the Rohirrim are not truly brave? You may think this is the rambling of an old woman, but it’s true. We are just not afraid, do not feel fear in much the same way a blind man cannot see light. Or rather, we cannot feel it most of the time. But that is not bravery – it is perhaps the opposite of bravery. No, not cowardice, cowardice is the absence of bravery – I talk of something that is its opposite, for bravery is overcoming your fear. The Rohirrim have no fear to overcome. We are, or at least were, simply content to ride into a glorious death in battle, to readily follow our commanders, and others see that eagerness and mistake it for courage. We do not realise that the reward of war is nothing. What man needs nothing? What is there to love in nothing? Better to love good earth, and music, and a warm fire. War is necessary at times, of course, in the defence of those things, but I do not think it needs to be performed in joy.”

Barahir eyed her carefully, this woman who knew the secret of war. Those who had lived through a war as tremendous as that generally did, but there were fewer and fewer of them, and so many of those who, like him, had been born under the hand of peace were so quick to betray that flowing, capricious mistress, finding her flesh soft, her habits decadent, her demands meddlesome. They waxed nostalgic about battlefields they had never seen from the comforts of a good chair. But this woman knew, and that somehow endowed her in his eyes with an added significance.

She half-closed her blue eyes that were filmed white with age. “Forgive me if I stray, my lord. But I think I must explain what… what the Rohirrim are like, if you are to make sense of what happened next. A sense of sorts, at least. You see, when Rohirrim do feel fear, we do not know what to do, maybe because the feeling is so unaccustomed, so foreign, that we halt to try to understand what this new thing is. It is too great. I once saw a small bird standing in front of a snake that was staring straight at it. It wasn’t a very large snake, and the bird could have flown away at any instant. And yet it just stood there, paralysed, ensnared by that stare until it was bitten and killed and swallowed whole.” She let the obvious conclusion hanging in the air, unspoken.

“So for a while we stood there, undecided. Cut the head and the body falls. We need our leaders, us Rohirrim. When a King dies, sometimes even before his death, another is proclaimed immediately. Not just Kings, of course – any commanding person. We do not need them _there_ , mind. We need just the knowledge that there is a leader, somewhere, and we will go even unto the end of the world. We have, however, very little ability to deal with uncertainty. And her absence and the dreadful day made us feel uncertainty, the very greatest uncertainty.

“So we stood there, dry-eyed and straight-backed but gnawed at by that sharp-toothed serpent, and even the smaller children felt that crush of dread and started crying and their mothers quietened them with sharp tongues and sharper hands. What were we to do? We had been told to stay, and the Lady had taken an oath to lead us as though she were the King himself. We could not comprehend how she had vanished, and what was now our duty.

“And then I remembered what I had heard. It returned to my mind as though disappointment had buried it and dread had brought it back. At that time, it felt immensely important.” Her fingers were wrapped around the cup like claws, locked in a moment of anger and guilt that had long since found out that time heals nothing. “So I insisted with the woman that I had something important, something vital, to tell my father, and I tore myself from her and ran through the Hold searching for him, with her calling for me, dragging her children behind her, hot on my heels. I was panting when I found him, and he tried to shoo me away, and I could see the worry in his face. So before he could say anything, I blurted out what I had overheard. I told it awkwardly, but he kneeled down in front of me, laid his hands on my shoulders and told me to repeat it, slower and with all I could remember. So I did, and though he tried to be dismissive, saying it was probably of no importance, I could see that it had troubled him. The woman, who had stood besides us as I spoke, was twisting her hands, though her face was expressionless. He rose and told me to go back to the Hold, and as I allowed to woman to drag me back to our cluster of booths, her children trotting about her and eyeing me suspiciously, I looked over my shoulder and saw my father speaking with the other guardsmen at that end of the Hold.

“That night a fire was lit. There were talks, though I was a child and had no part in them. I peered from the door of our little booth and saw my father talking, and the folks around him were lapping up his words like thirsty dogs, a thirst for something that was almost like knowledge or certainty. I could see the shadow of the great stones in the fog, looking like terrible giants in the weak firelight. Then I shut the door and sat on the floor in the pale light of our single candle. The children were in bed, and their mother was listening to the talk outside.”

The old lady placed the half-empty cup on the little table beside her, next to her summoning bell, slowly, as though the movement pained her. She folded her hands on her dark lap, like pale dried leaves.

“I… buried my face in my hands, and I knew as only a child knows that they were lost, all of them; Théoden King and his Riders had fallen, and so had that captain with his Elves and Dwarves, and the Lady had wandered off into the mists and how we were all alone in a land of spectres. Maybe everybody else had died, everywhere, and there were only ghosts around us, ready to take us with them into the Shadowland. I lifted my eyes and they darted about in the darkness, and I felt that the darkness moved and called my name. Then I felt angry, and snatched up the candle and waved it about in the dark. I don’t want to be a ghost, I said, and the smallest child woke up and started whimpering.” She shrugged her shoulders awkwardly. “I was just a silly girl.”

“But I would not cry, and I would not behave foolishly when others needed me. So I got into bed and quietened the child the best I could, and as I did that I kept thinking, Lady, why have you abandoned us?, until I fell myself into an uneasy sleep, in which I kept running in a deep mist from a dread with no face.”

“The following day I woke up late, long past dawn, dizzy and tired as though I had run all night. I let you sleep, the woman said, with a stony face. She was sitting at our tiny table, cutting thin slices of hard bread and even harder cheese. Her hands and voice were firm, but it was the sort of firmness that comes when you realise that what you dreaded would happen has already happened. It was best this way, she said as she gave a little of our precious milk to her youngest. They will be back soon, in any case, she added. I scrambled out of bed and put on my dress and my shoes. I did not know what she meant so I demanded it from her in a shrill voice. Your father and others went looking for the Lady, she said. It was decided last night. They reckon she can’t be far, and they won’t go far. Her voice was blunt. I think they should have gone sooner.

“I sprang to her, my hands on the table. She did not flinch. How many?, I asked, how long ago? She seemed uncertain. A dozen, a dozen and a half, she said. More than could be spared, in any case. Not very long ago, she believed, but who could tell in that forsaken mist? They had taken the path that led to the Haunted Mountain, she believed, as my story suggested she had gone that way.”

She paused heavily, and her hands were entwined, so tight the veins stood out like blue cords, great painted rivers on the whiteness of a map.

“I… I cannot quite tell how terrible that moment was,” the old woman continued, in a voice that was as frail, as defiant as a tiny boat tossed about by a storm. “I could not tell why, still cannot, but it felt as though the whole weight of the world was crushing me. Like I had something inside of me waiting to burst, some malignant child. I got up and ran out and tripped and fell and got up and ran again until an old man caught me. I almost threw him down in my rage, but by then the woman had caught up with me and she gave me a slap and shook me by my shoulders and told me to stop being foolish or she would drag me back. Did I think I was the only one who loved someone who had gone to danger? And not a great danger at that, as her husband had ridden to meet death and my father would surely come back. Who did I think I was?

“So I allowed myself to be led back, dejected, and we waited there in the mist, under that terrible fog that made you feel as though you were never going to see the light again, that robbed you of the will to live, to go on, as though a great ravenous beast had swallowed the sun whole. Even I was feeling it then, and the sick and wounded we had brought with us felt it worst of all. Even worse than the hard journey we had made. Quite a few of them ended up dying, and maybe they would have died anyway, but I do wonder if it wasn’t the added weight of hopelessness in addition to the ills of the flesh that killed them. How could we have given them hope, if we had no one to give it to us? But what I regret the most is not having seen my father just before he left.” She looked down at her hands on her lap, and looked almost vanquished.

Barahir cleared his throat very lightly. “Why is that, lady?”

She looked straight at him, blue eyes innocent of meaning. “I never saw him again, my lord. No one did. Not any of the others. They all vanished without a trace.”

“I see,” he said, his voice perfectly even.

She shook her head lightly. “Few are able to do so, my lord. We waited, and waited, and we waited again, but no one ever came to ease our pain, because no one ever does. Then it was another spectres-haunted night, and the following day – if you can call it day – the plateau was like an island of stone surrounded by dirty mist. Everything was quiet. Sunless, and dead quiet. I cannot tell you how it was, to huddle there, abandoned, lost, as still as that bird in the gaze of the snake, waiting only to be swallowed whole. Maybe we had all died already, and we were in the Shadowland, to dwell forever as haunts. Who knew? I knew only that I had lost my father, that he would never hear me calling to him ever again. And so we waited for death to take us, to at least free us from our misery. We were leaderless, we were surrounded by ghosts, we had been abandoned, and little by little, we went insane. But we wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry.” She turned her eyes towards his. “I can’t. I don’t.” She shut her eyes tight, her face a mask of inexpressible sadness for a moment, and when she opened them again they were dry like sand.

Barahir felt curiously drained. The significance of this was too deep and heavy for the now, filling him with a peculiar sort of dread. _The idol fell, and released a river of fire_. It was like the thorough satisfaction of a wish made in youthful rebellion, ignorant and petty, a desire for riches answered by a deadly shower of gold.

“What happened to your father and the others, my lady?” he asked carefully.

“No one knows. How many dangers are there in the world? They vanished from memory as much as from sight. No one even asked that question – it was muffled in the roar of victory, when the fog dispelled at last, and the shadow was vanquished, and we returned to our homes. Do you know that, by some twist of fate, that woman’s husband survived and came back? We knew the truth about the Lady, then. She had not been lost at all. She had just gone off the with Riders in disguise, dragging the Halfling behind her, for no better reason than she wanted to, and now had returned as a _heroine_.” The word fell from her lips dripping with distaste. “And then we were supposed to revere that woman as though she had delivered us from all the hosts of Mordor. A heroine, simply because she had been capricious, childish, selfish. None of us spoke. What could we say? Who were we? No more than those who stayed, and those who died in secrecy. Better to busy ourselves with our lives. We all knew, and we were all silent. No song for us or for the missing and the dead. They were forgotten in the little skirmishes of time. They meant no more than an instant, barely noticed. What did those few do? What did they matter?

“But I remember. No one thinks of them anymore. But I do not forget. And when I am gone into my grave, then they will be less than the smallest shadow. Forgotten. Forever.”

She fell silent, and a single, solitary tear fell off a blue eye, full and perfect, and rolled down her white face, and then it broke away into nothingness. Barahir felt as though that moment was glistening with a deep, hidden meaning, and felt the weighty touch of Destiny, filling him with a fretful sorrow. He pushed it away, composed himself, drank the rest of his wine, his smooth self-control returning.

“There is not much more to tell,” she added. “And it’s of little importance. Éomer King learned that I was left with no family, staying where I was accepted, and so he took pity on me and had me brought to Meduseld, where the Lady was at the time presenting to Rohan her new troph—” Her face tightened and she cleared her throat. “Her new trothplight husband, the Prince Faramir, that is. And meanwhile, Halflings had destroyed Mordor and the Lord Aragorn was now King Elessar in Mundburg, and none of it mattered much to me. I felt no more than a stunned nothingness. Éomer King asked me if I wished to stay at Meduseld and I said no, and then he asked me if I wished to go to Mundburg, and I said yes, and that was all. He took me to the Queen Arwen, and I did not care if she was or had been of the Elder race, or if she was Queen or what have you. She did not mind my sullen ways, though, perhaps because she knew even more sharply what it was like, to lose both mother and father, was feeling the eminence of the latter keenly, and I told her that I was twelve and could work hard. So she took me as a maid when she returned to Minas Tirith and taught me how to read and write and speak and act in a dignified manner, for which I am grateful. And then I married, and that is the end of my story.”

There was silence. Barahir felt inexplicably tired, heavy with damning knowledge.

“Thank you, my lady,” he said. “Your tale was most… instructive, and you were very helpful. I shall trouble you no further.”

She looked at him, almost relieved, as though he had somehow cleansed her from all guilt.

“It is only the truth,” she said. “Though I think there are none who care.”

He wanted to feel a surge of that burning sense of justice his grandsire said was so important, and he conjured no more than a feeble spark. He had a weary sense already of the essential unfairness of life.

It did not, however, have to be a lie.

“I care,” he said, and was not surprised to realise that, at that time, that was the whole and perfect truth.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (PG-13) (complete) Barahir, the writer grandson of Faramir and Eowyn, tries to find out what truth shall he write about his legendary grandmother. Written in answer to the _owyn: Heroine or Deserter?_ challenge. By A L Milton, illustrated by Hydy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story owes unabashedly quite a bit to _Citizen Kane_ , and quite a bit to my meta-fic impulses. There were no attempts made to "write forsoothly". Old-fashioned delivery is all very well, pseudo-mediaevalism isn't. Barahirs personality was partially gleamed from his authorship of _The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen_ (App A in LotR), the rest is my own speculation. The woman he sees in his dream is the Vala Vair (Weaver of the stories of Arda, hence, Destiny). I hope you have enjoyed this story and that you find the time to review it. Thank you!

VI.

Mazikeen had been resting an elbow unceremoniously on the stand where the shield and sword lay as he told the story, fingers twirling a tip of her head-scarf absent-mindedly. Presently she blinked slowly and drew herself up.

“That is it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

There was a pause, as uncomfortable as jagged glass.

“Will you write that?” she asked at last.

“What?”

“Of her treason,” she explained painstakingly, “and its consequences. Of her… abjuring the oath she took.”

He said nothing. How could he translate that knowledge of his, the ever-shifting winds of his grandmother? Like the sea, like sand, like a drifting cloud. She was vast like a mountain, contradictory like feathers and steel. She was not like the others, whose essence he had deciphered throughout his increasingly cynical youth. She had died when he was eleven, a legend he could not pin down, flying like one of those great Haradrim kites, drifting away from him forever.

He almost shook his head at this. Such fanciful nonsense!

“I understand,” she said smoothly. “It would not be politic, to depict your grandmother as… as no better than a common deserter. Well, worse, as a common deserter is no more than a lowly soldier, in truth owing nothing to no one but himself, but she had been entrusted with the many and left them to pursue the desires of the few. But of course you cannot write that, at least now with Rohan tied to your tails like the poor relative at a wedding. They have long since been your allies, at least for far longer than Harad,” she said with a meaningful sharpness. “Rohan is your lady wife, Harad the painted concubine of the moment. I understand.”

He took in her glib self-congratulation.

“Your powers are failing you, Mazikeen,” he said wryly. “I do not care for what those uncouth horse-riders think of my book. They may have acquired a veneer of civilisation, but I find it highly unlikely that they will be interested in poring over so many pages about the beginnings of our glorious age, particularly as my book is entirely devoid of verse and touches very little upon horses.”

“Oh, of course, the Rohirrim don’t like books, do they?”

“I believe they like books with thin pages,” he answered sharply. A muscle twitched in Mazikeen’s cheek. “But enough of this nonsense. It is not for a question of politics that I hesitate. Politics is the art of the possible and my book concerns matters that took place either long ago or in places shrouded too deeply by the veils of legend or distance or majesty. And most people do not care much about either politics or histories, because they are too busy dealing with the vagaries of the mundane, working, buying, worrying, selling, loving, rushing, lying, falling asleep and waking for another day of the same.” He paused for a moment.

“Do you find that distasteful?” The eyebrow rising again.

“I find it, above all, necessary. But I am straying; I meant to say that I fear no one’s opinion.”

“What, then?” she said impatiently.

His gaze slid up, into the beam of light that fell upon them both like a ghost river. “When I discovered the truth about Dunharrow,” he began slowly, “I though I had discovered the hidden truth about my grandmother, and that when I wrote my book I would reveal my damning great discovery, and then the reality behind that dreadful versification would not be forgotten. You do not quite understand the significance of this, but let me tell you that the prospect of doing that to _her_ , who had been my grandmother, and in the days of my youth, was almost… pleasurable. Dreadful, yet pleasurable. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you view it, I had even then the habit of not committing myself irrevocably to one position, and so I kept on searching about her, and discovered that she was also, undeniably, every bit the hero legend claims her to be. Who would have thought those dreary songs were right after all?”

Mazikeen had resumed her thoughtful play with her bracelet as he neared the end of his explanation. “She was both deserter _and_ heroine? What an intriguing notion.”

“Come here, Mazikeen,” he said forcefully. She did not hesitate to step up to him, so close he could see her dress rising and falling ever so slightly with each breath. She had a spicy, soapy smell about her. It was not that she trusted him, or he her; quite simply, there was, and there had been for some time, a sort of perennial truce between them. She could have damned him ten times with what she knew, and he could have accomplished her destruction even more thoroughly and effectively. But neither of them did, because neither of them would. She had a saying that the higher you went, the heavier your weaknesses felt.

“Yes?”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and turned her towards the tapestry. “Tell me, Mazikeen, what do you see?”

He felt her body sighing, deep and physical and uncaring. “Look carefully, Mazikeen.”  
  
“I see…” In the light, the threads of the hanging seemed to shift, and in that frozen moment the wings of the Beast moved once again, and it screeched its black hunger of carrion. “I see shadow, and fear.”

He reached around her for the sword hilt, and placed it in her right hand. She received it unprotesting, and held it up silently as he took her left hand in his.

“Can you imagine it?” he whispered in her ear, sewing himself to her like a shadow. “Just a sword in your hand.” He took her right hand, and made her thrust the fragment of sword, the glittering blade ending incongruously mere inches away from the hilt. “And a shield in the other.” He lifted her left hand as though she were holding an invisible buckler. “And you are unhorsed, and you are alone with your dying King, the man who was like a father to you, and a Halfling who has fallen in the mud. There is so very little mud in songs and so much of it in battlefields, you know? Mud and blood and tears. You love that fallen man, and yet you hate him, hate him because he brought you up to be something he then denies you, because you were born in the body of a maiden. They all deny it to you, expect you to sit still as your house burns and crumbles around you. And there is another, the thought of whom you cannot even bear, because you thought he would carve a path for you, shine a light for you, tear the bars of your cage down for you, and yet all he does is lock your chains tighter as he offers you his pity. His _pity_!” He endowed the word with all the meanings of scorn. “What will you do? What can you do? There is only one thing you have learned to do, only one thing you know how to do, and it is the one thing they will not let you do. Where will you run to now?”

She took one half-step back and her held her still, her back pressing against his body. He could almost feel her heart beating through the fabric of their adjoining clothes, beating like a bird tossing itself against the bars of its cage in desperation. “You cannot go that way,” he said, pressing his cheek against the thin scarf and the thick mass of hair underneath. “There are no other ways. There is only one way left, and it’s covered with thorns, thick brambles to tear your flesh. And in the end, there is Death. It will stop for you. It always does. It will give you glory. It will give you rest. It will give you peace. And maybe you will not die in vain, trying to put out the fire in your house. But riding before Death comes that.” He raised her sword arm, and the broken blade sliced the air with a sickening whistle. He spoke with his cold cheek almost pressed against hers, and his voice sounded like an echo out of a great dark cavern of time. “Devourer of souls. Lord of carrion. Prince of Foulness. Do you not know the one you call…Destiny?”

She spun around fiercely like a cornered cat, pushing him back with unaccustomed curtness. Her black eyes glistened with the fury of a lightened furnace. “Enough! Enough.” She collected herself with a deep breath, languid and cool once more, and realised she was still holding the sword-hilt in one outstretched hand. She turned to replace it, and it dropped on the stand with a strident clatter. When she faced him once more she bore a thin smile, smooth and imperious. He noticed, however, that her chest was still rising and falling rapidly, in disguised panting. “That is enough, Barahir. I think I understand what you mean,” she said coolly, and then added, “though I do not know how you learned it.”

He shrugged and looked at her calmly, the quiet, unnoticed scrivener once more. “Oh, I spoke to old soldiers who had felt the Witch-King, who saw him flying over them on his Beast like a messenger of their doom. Even in their old age they trembled at the memory. They said that when he was near a despair so great fell upon you in such a manner you felt as though it would never lift, ever again. You just felt like crawling in the dirt like the worm you were and shrivelling and dying under that mortal gaze. As for the rest… well, my family has always been… perceptive.” He lowered his eyes, as though betraying some inner, secret thorn. “And I know very well what it is like to have forbidden paths.”

She joined her hands underneath her chin, her face hinting at an ache that was ancient and hidden. “Only because you want to.”

“Mazikeen, listen to me.” She opened her mouth as if to protest and he pressed on. “No, listen. I am the son of a Steward, and you are the daughter of an envoy, and from the wrong side of the Bay of Belfalas.”

“I would be from the right side if I were the daughter of the Jade Throne,” she spat, but with no real venom, a phrase said so often it was worn threadbare.

He sighed, and the sound was laden with tiredness. “We have talked of this before. And I have told you many times that Minas Tirith will need me. And Minas Tirith needs me to choose a wife of suitable rank. She is an unkind mistress, that White City; she thinks first and foremost of herself. Do you understand? I know you do.”

Her face was still and unbeatable once again. “You can just leave, you know,” she said. “Let someone else sacrifice for her.”

He looked at the floor and seemed to sag curiously, like a reed bending in the wind. “No. I cannot.”

She stepped up to him silently and placed a hand on his shoulder. “No. Of course you cannot,” she said, with unfamiliar sweetness.

And she knew what she had known so often before, that some part of her was glad at these games, these encounters stolen in the underside of a moment, glad that they would never know staleness, that he would not abandon his burden for her sake like a player leaving an unfinished game of chess, and then brood because of that and taste the bitter honey of regret and resentment, and then know the dark decades of a long widowhood. Ever since she was old enough to listen, she had listened to politics, brought up in the shifting mirrors and panels of the Veiled City, beneath the spidery gaze of the Jade Throne. She understood, and she approved, and in the secret fencing that had brought them together as firmly and inexplicably as a storm and its path, she knew that he knew of it, and she was satisfied.

“Now, what will you write?” she asked, business-like, crossing her arms aloofly beneath her breasts.

“I was rather hoping that you could tell me.”

She appeared to ponder the question, one hand raised to stroke her chin pensively. “Well, you can write of the traitor, but she was a traitor who slew the Rider of Shadow, who had killed so many, thus saving many more, or you can write of a heroine, but she was a heroine who abandoned her sworn people to terror and death. I don’t suppose there is any chance of you being able to write both? Oh, of course not, this is history; it has an unfortunate tendency to solidify the moment the ink on its pages is dry, don’t you agree?”

This time he had a pleased, clipped smile for her. “I am ever so glad you _understand_ , Mazikeen. I really cannot abide foolish women,” he said with some distaste.

“So now you will have to choose one,” she went on, “and I do not envy that choice. I think – yes – that it all comes down to one thing: you will have to weigh those two bands of nameless people in your scales and decide which can vanish into the backpages of history.”

“A masterful summation,” he said flatly.

“One must do one’s best.”

He had not meant it in mockery, he realised. Mazikeen had pierced the heart of the matter with an uncaring spear. His grandmother was like the shards of a broken mirror, each piece full of the sharp light of a different memory: slayer, mother, Healer, Princess, wife, traitor. All the others he had written about had been so easy to pin down, a single easy attribute, a single memorable self. He knew that what he had written or had decided to write about them might not be necessarily true, but it was a truth. Not an endless gallery of mirrors bearing thousands of different reflections.

“So now I have to choose,” he said calmly, his voice a drawl that moved like a slow breeze passing over a leaves-strewn ground. “Do you know, I think I have a great deal of work to do on the Red Book of the Periannath. In a charitable sense, that is. They have a passion for the melodramatic and the niggling detail, not to mention the labyrinthine branches of their family trees. It would greatly benefit from a corrective hand, and one that does not shrink from an arduous task. But still, after it’s worked upon, it may turn out to be useful.”

“You are avoiding the matter,” Mazikeen said frostily.

“I suppose I am, at that. It is not completely straightforward, as I think I had chance to demonstrate.”

“When you are Steward,” she said, chin raised proudly, “you will have to make decisions like that every day.”

“That,” he answered evenly, “will not make them any easier. You know, I think my grandsire – the Prince Faramir, that is – was right.”

Her eyebrows raised very slightly, and she seemed to shift underhandedly, like a hawk who has detected a stir of motion in a patch of grass.

“Indeed?”

“Yes. I asked him about her once, you see. He wanted to make sure I would not ask him again, for reasons I took a little while to understand, so he told me that his memories of her were his memories, after all, and not for sharing, no more than she would share her memories of him, were she living, were he dead.”

“A most appropriate answer.” There was a hint of gloating to her voice.

“Possibly. But I can sometimes be persuasive, and he said another thing. He said that she did what she had to do, and would tell me no more.”

He felt silent, and her eyes were peculiarly widened, as though in disappointment at a drab conclusion. “Is that all? Don’t we all do what we have to do?”

He had a weak, knowing smile for that. “I think it is quite the opposite, Mazikeen. Most of us do what they can, some do what they must, and a very few do what they have to.”

He contemplated the spectral light of the chamber, its alcoves redolent of years, the tapestry framing Mazikeen, hanging like an austere messenger of the past. He believed he understood it very clearly now. Somehow, it had all come to make sense, like the carving that turns out to be a button, a button you press to flip a lid open. There were times so clear it seemed Eternity itself stretched before you, and he could almost feel the rustle of the wings of Destiny, full of a touch that was blessed, and without regret or eagerness.

_I am not important. I was there, and so were many others. But we didn’t kill it. She did. She and the Halfling were the ones who slew the Fell Captain. No one who wasn’t there knows what that means. But that’s important, my lord. That was what mattered._

“So, you will write her as the heroine after all?” she asked.

“I will write of her as the woman who found the will to go on in the darkest pit of her despair. I will write of her as the woman who slew the Lord of the Nazgûl with the aid of a Halfling. I will write of her as an example for others to see and follow, even if they can only follow in an insignificant way.”

“And when it is not insignificant? Would you have them throw away the lives of others? What of things hanging by a thread, do you think it does well to cut them lose? They may fall instead of flying.”

He smiled, certain that she could perceive the steely knowledge in his eyes, and that she did not know what to make of his realisation.

“Have you ever thought of how many had to sacrifice so greatly, unwillingly or hopelessly, so that we could inherit the world? And those who are already willing to waste others’ lives like twigs thrown to a fire will not be salvaged by any word I write. Everything hangs by a thread - this peace, with all its traps and trappings, this glory, but a dead leaf to be swept away by the wind. Not because of some new Shadow, but because it is in the nature of things to diminish and die. Not while we live, and maybe not for many lives, but there will be a night for Men as surely as the sun sets. And in that hour I would like to think that there will be a truth in my words, or in an echo of my words, or in an echo of an echo of my words. A truth for those who dared against all odds to spite the darkness in the darkest hour. There once was a dream that was the Light. It would not be worth the death of a good man if it could not be dreamt again.” He ran an unaware hand through his hair, a habit Mazikeen had come to know meant nervousness or embarrassment. “You do not think it is so.”

She gathered herself silently and stepped up to him, in the sinuous fashion of her people, until they were close as lovers. She lay her hands on his shoulders, and though he flinched as he always did, unbeknownst to himself, he accepted her touch unwavering.

“My great-great-uncle died in the Pelennor Fields,” she said smoothly, “though of course he was in the… other side. What you told me about your grandmother is so tremendous, and yet from the moment you told me of your dilemma, I was hoping that you would write of her as the Wraithslayer, even though, or perhaps because, we have both long ago destroyed and mocked the legends of out childhood, and this was a legend that lived, and whose blood runs in your veins. Perhaps we are at that age in which we can find a certain… pertinence in those legends we mocked in our glib youth, but I did not truly know why I wanted her to be a heroine, and I detest being at a loss, so I decided it was best to forsake the Rider and play with the Captain. He has such an interesting movement, don’t you think? So… oblique. Now that you’ve laid your game bare, I understand that those were my reasons all along. I think she did wrong, and yet maybe she could be forgiven. _Ay_ , I suspect I am not as proficient in this Uncommon Tongue as I had hoped for,” she finished, with an expression of mock sadness.

He looked at her as though he was weighing her craftiness and finding it most satisfactory. “I think you are right,” he said. “I think that was what I wanted to write all along. That that was the shard of glass that mattered, and I just fooled myself with the others. I, too, detest being at a loss.”

“Then why the dilemma?”

“Maybe because, like you said, she did wrong. Maybe because I said I cared, and I do. Maybe because I was so pleased with my own discovery that I wanted her to have acknowledged it, somehow. I wanted her to have regretted the consequences of her desertion. Maybe she did, but I did not learn of it, and when you do not know of a thing, it did not happen. Or perhaps it is because I accept the glory of the guilty in life, but could not accept it in a legend. I write my stories clear, be them sad or mirthful, and she was unclear. So many different memories. Maybe if I had had more time with her… sometimes I think I was born too late.”

“And those in Dunharrow who went missing? Will they be missing forever, with no one to mourn them or to remember?"

He placed his hands slowly upon her back. “I do not write happy little tales. I will write of the woman who became a Rider and the Rider who became a hero, and I will tell of Dunharrow. I will tell of Dunharrow until she left, and I will tell of her oath, and then speak no more of it. While there is darkness, all thoughts will go to her courage and her despair, and how she vanquished the later, and how she was rewarded. She rode to meet Death, yet it was not Death who stopped for her. It was my grandsire, and honour and renown, and this palace, and my father and my aunts and uncle, and a long and glorious life. But then the darkness will give way to a new dawn, as surely as the night gives way to the day, and maybe there will be a peace so long or so deep that some will have time to pore over these old tales and ponder their hidden meanings. Maybe some will think of her oath, and realise she broke it, and think about the untold consequences. And maybe someone, or none, or a few, or all, will reach the truth in their speculation. It does not really matter; what matters is that someone will think of it, and of her not as an unchangeable idol, but as a woman who lived, with the triumphs and failings that implies.”

“Do you think that will be enough?” she asked. “To mention Dunharrow and leave it, unwritten? Don’t you think that all who read about it will give it no more than a thought? Do you believe that someone may truly give it more than a moment’s consideration?”

“Someone might.” He turned his eyes down, and gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Or, at least, that is what I hope will happen.”

She raised one hand to pat his cheek playfully. “Be at ease. The present is jurisdiction enough without your having to oversee the future as well. ‘She did what she had to do.’ Yes. I do see it.”

“A worthy epitaph, don’t you agree? Both the good and the bad – maybe.” He shook his head slightly. “Théoden should not have chosen her. She was no politician. Nor was he, for that matter.”

Whatever answer she might have had, it remained unspoken forever, cut by the clear ringing of a silver bell, slicing the silence in the chamber like a blade. They disassembled their embrace.  
“Time to go,” he said.

“Will the other guests leave tomorrow?” she asked, as they started walking slowly towards the door.

“Yes, and you must go with them.”

“Of course,” she sniffed.

There was something in her tone that made him halt and take her hand in his.

“Mazikeen, my father has been dropping none too subtle hints about possible unions for me, and I am at an age in which I cannot invent many more excuses. Eldarion married for love but he did not marry well, and now my own marriage needs to gather all the support we lost and more. This will be a matter of politics, and as it is for the sake of the City and the realm, I cannot say no. I am afraid I do as I must, not as I have to.” There was a tinge of sadness to his voice.

“I know that. I have my burdens too, or have you forgotten that? I understand. I always have. I know how things are. And besides, we cannot all be good wives.”

He took her slick dismissal impassively. “I want you to know, though, that you were and are the one who mattered.”

She smiled wanly. Even though she lacked his family’s _perception_ she could already anticipate the heavy folds of the future. They would keep up their pretence of a vague, nodding acquaintance, and exchange anxious whispers that said things like “tomorrow - same time, same place,” and enjoy some few painful, precious moments snatched in the bowels of some clandestine room. And one day she would return to the Land, to Harad and the Veiled City to perform her duty to serve and follow the path she had been taught almost from birth. Maybe she would return, and they would catch glimpses of each other in a crowd like prickles of light in a dark sky, the tug of a vaguely familiar face in a foreign city. Or maybe they would tire of each other and their trials before she left, and start that soon the task of forgetting each other, their memories devoid of meaning like a leaf pressed between the pages of a book is devoid of sap. They had both known from the tentative start that the end would come.

And yet, it would not come today.

“And I want you to know that I will be with you forever,” she said haughtily. “I must.”

“Well, if you absolutely _must_.”

They both had a genteel laugh for that, and went away from the realm of the dead. In his mind, Barahir was already composing in his sober prose the tale of the woman who lost and found herself and the heroine with a secret, who had found out that it takes more effort to live than to die. As for Mazikeen, she looked at his focused face and knew that what she had told him wasn’t the entire truth – but that was not really important. Nothing was ever the entire truth – it only had to be the truth for long enough.

~ The End ~

*******  
  


**Disclaimer:** “April was the most pointless month” is a parody of sorts of T S Eliot’s _The Waste-Land_ (which is why April is used instead of Víressë). “He had literary pretensions” is paraphrased from Frank Herbert’s _Dune_. “The world and all within it were like a house of leaves moments before the wind” comes from Mark Z. Danielewski’s _House of Leaves_. “You were wrought in a time of war, and so you had to learn courage and hope for the future. But I was wrought in a time of peace, and so I learn mistrust and caution” is very liberally paraphrased from T E Lawrence’s _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_. “No one ever came to ease our pain, because no one ever does” comes from Thomas Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_. “What man needs nothing?” is paraphrased from Robert Bolt’s screenplay for _Lawrence of Arabia_. “… and little by little, we went insane” is pretty much what Francis Ford Copolla said about the making of _Apocalypse Now_. Mazikeen owes her name to the legendary “mazikeen,” a synonym of “djinn.” It seemed appropriate to her particular cultural origins. She also owes a line to her name-sake in Neil Gaiman’s _The Kindly Ones_. Faramir’s description of his memories of Éowyn comes from Neil Gaiman once more, this time from _The Wake_. “She did what she had to do” comes from Terry Pratchett’s _Night Watch_. Once again, no money is being made, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.  
  


**Author’s Note:** This story owes – unabashedly – quite a bit to _Citizen Kane_ , and quite a bit to my meta-fic impulses. There were no attempts made to "write forsoothly". Old-fashioned delivery is all very well, pseudo-mediaevalism isn't. Barahir’s personality was partially gleamed from his authorship of _The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen_ (App A in LotR), the rest is my own speculation. The “woman” he sees in his dream is the Vala Vairë (Weaver of the stories of Arda, hence, Destiny). I hope you have enjoyed this story and that you find the time to review it. Thank you! 


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